2025

Every physical and digital artifact in the human-built environment is the product of a design process, and every decision that designers make—from how to gather research information, to what materials to use—carries ethical implications. That is, every choice that designers make has the potential to shape the distribution of benefits and harms. Yet, very often, designers are not fully aware of these ethical implications and are not trained to navigate the complex ethical dilemmas that they encounter in their work. Consequently, we are surrounded by objects and systems that perpetuate social injustices and environmental destruction.” (engineering.dartmouth.edu/courses/engs15-09) This is the beginning of the course description for ENGS 15.09 (Design Ethics), a new undergraduate course taught at Dartmouth College by Eugene Korsunskiy, and developed collaboratively by Korsunskiy and Kate Nolfi in 2024.We will bring together scholars representing disciplinary expertise in design with scholars representing disciplinary expertise in ethics in order to facilitate interdisciplinary conversation and seed what might become co-authored publications, including possibly an edited volume on the subject. Our twin goals are (i) to stimulate rigorous scholarship aimed at analyzing the complexity of the ethical issues that the design process raises and (ii) to help catalyze the education of critically conscious, socially responsible, and justice-oriented designers that graduate from NEHC member institutions and beyond.

This project aims to foster cross-institutional and interdisciplinary collaboration on the themes of race and childhood through a week-long workshop at Brown University in partnership with Dartmouth College. Our goals are twofold: first, to create space for faculty and students from the humanities and humanistic social sciences to share research, build mentor relationships, and develop collaborative projects extending beyond the workshop; second to engage public audiences through a storytelling event that highlights the humanistic relevance of scholarship on race and childhood, demonstrating how academic inquiry can spark dialogue across disciplines, institutions, and communities.

The aim of our project is to produce a richly documented, interactive, and illustrated website of the medieval architectural and sculptural fragments housed in New England collections. Over two hundred objects that hail from across Europe and date from the Middle Ages—roughly from the fifth to the sixteenth century— are scattered across the museums of New England. These fragments were once, by their very nature and definition, part of a larger entity, to which they now refer synecdochica lly. Some are all that remain of the original, while others may point indexically to something still extant, but now broken. To collect, catalog, and to make digitally consultable these fragments is, at once, to do historical justice to these objects; to enable the recounting of a more holistic story of a millennium of European history; and, finally, to uncover the ambitions that brought these objects across the Atlantic. Our project functions as an exploratory tool to investigate a plethora of distant times, far-off places, as well as the American past and present.